Poem Beginning with the First Line from
Maureen Scott Harris’ Poem
“LOOSENING GHAZAL”
I wake from a dream of old friends not seen for years.
This
morning I woke from a dream in which I was
on
a stool, at a restaurant counter, and seated
next
to me was a young woman, maybe in her
mid-20s,
with black hair and a pale friendly face
who
introduced herself, if I remember correctly
right
now, five-and-a-half hours after waking up,
as
“Elaine Rabinowitz.” In the dream she was a complete
stranger,
as she is right now when I’m awake
too.
It wasn’t too odd in the dream that she
introduced herself and just before I woke I think
she
said she was new to the town, wherever
we
were. What was odder was that I knew
I’d
never been in that restaurant before, and
when
I sat down on that stool a woman
(is
it politically incorrect now to call her a
waitress?)
approached me and knew my name.
I
don’t think I asked her if she knew me.
It
was as if I were a “regular” in the restaurant.
In
my dreams I’m usually never a “regular”
anywhere. This poem of mine is very
different
from your first line of your ghazal.
Your
poem contains a moon, a small
plane,
the earth, chimney
smoke,
un-
predecented
snow, the branches of an
oak,
memory/memories, the direction
east,
the revolution
of
the earth, and, in the second line, a
“now.”
But I list these
out of order (that is, the order
in
your ghazal). I wonder if in your childhood
you
were ever in a scavenger hunt. I believe
I
was in one, back in the days when – at least,
in
Phoenix – someone rang the doorbell
or
knocked, the people inside weren’t
afraid
to open the door. And I remember having a
list
of random things and asking
strangers
if they had any of them, with the
expectation
that since they were fairly
cheap things they would be willing to part with them.
A
button, say, or toothpick. I don’t remember
anyone
being mean. Am I suggesting that the way
I
listed “things” from your poem in any
way
resembles that scavenger hunt
from
my past? Probably. At that party I was
with
old friends, and maybe some of them are
dead
now. Here are first two lines of YOUR poem:
I wake from a dream of old friends not seen for years.
For all I know they’re dead—yet I remember them now.
It may be un-
comfortable to talk about any normal
dread, even more the dread when one, alone
in bed, can’t get
to sleep, noise or not
outside, perhaps recalling the fears
of a small child at night in the dark.
“You little fool,” no grown-up
said to me, in part because I didn’t talk
about being afraid and of what, and in part
because I lucked out and the grown-ups
in my family and their friends
wouldn’t insult me. I would’ve been horrified
had I known all of them would be dead
before me. I thought I’d die before I reached
11. That was a fact, like a tree trunk
or a few blades of grass growing
out of a sidewalk crack. The grown-ups
lived like the trees and grass, near me
and as there as all of nature, while I
waited for a person or animal
to murder me. My conviction
it would be before I reached 11
came from nowhere, too, without
question.
Note to Frej Larsen (August 30, 2026)
Yesterday morning and today, this
morning, in the desert where we live
near
the city of Tucson, Leslie and I have walked
near still and walking and running baby
lizards. Some tinier
than a human infant’s little finger, I think,
though
it has been a while since I’ve seen one of those
little fingers
whereas I’ve been seeing a lot of baby lizards.
Yesterday Leslie almost stepped on a very very
small baby horny toad, which sounds like it could
be a sort of frog, but it is a lizard that resembles
a dinosaur. Leslie has lived in Tucson almost all
her life (we did spend two years in a Greek
village) and this baby was the littlest horny toad
she had ever seen. This
news
will not be on any front page, or start any
novella. But now I imagine starting a novel
with a character almost stepping
on the littlest horny toad she’d ever seen, and
the thrill of seeing it
would fill
a short paragraph that introduces
her, and the setting, and then
she walks into the life she leads
in this novel, but suddenly she re-
turns, thinks she should’ve also looked
at the little shadow the lizard “threw”
and it hasn’t moved, and its
shadow
is
now
what she focuses on. And that’s the end
of Chapter One
The Bowls vs. The Tablecloths
In
our fourth grade Creative Writing class, Ms. Gladys Hastings Jones told us that
although poets shouldn’t compete with each other, she would split the class
into four teams. Frank raised his hand and asked if he could be the Captain of
a team and said he’d name his team The Yankees. Ms. Jones said No, no poet
would want to be the Captain of a team. Frank said she was wrong. She said
Poets are wrong a lot of the time and Frank said he was too and that was why he
would be a great Captain. Sally raised her hand and said she didn’t want to be
a Captain and she would name her team The Bowls. I raised my hand and said I
had never even dreamed of being any sort of Captain and I wanted to be on a
team named The Tablecloths. Ms. Jones said Fantastic, we had two names for the
first two teams. The whole class applauded at the same moment, as if we were
programmed or hypnotized by Ms. Jones and all the Walt Whitman she’d been
reading us for months. I looked at my hands meeting and separating, making that
clapping noise, and remembered when Ms. Jones first talked about the body of a
poem, the first day she told us she would be teaching Creative Writing and that
poems have bodies like butterflies and eels and hummingbirds and squirrels and
as she continued naming animals I kept hoping she’d name a lion or a firefly
and finally she did, one after the other.
Note to Robyn Schelenz (August 25, 2026)
I
thought today, on my drive home
from
somewhere other
than
home, that I’d like to write a poem
titled
“Eponymous.” It wouldn’t rhyme
much,
if I wrote it. I would hesitate
to
populate it with a hippopotamus merely
for
the rhyme. I wonder if any time you’ve
walked
Donut you’ve happened into another
dog
named, say, Scone. You’d only know
if
you and the other dog “owner” (do
any
of us really own “our” dogs?) began
to
talk, although you could also learn
if
that other human called out, “Here, Scone!”
Or,
“Good girl, Scone!” But back to
my
thought about titling a poem “Eponymous.”
I
like thinking of someone who doesn’t
know
the word, perhaps a child, seeing
pony in it and having no desire
to
look up the word, content with the
pony.
The pony. I can imagine the child’s
older
brother or sister singing The rain in Spain
falls mainly on the pony, to keep the pony
around.
Self-Portrait #411
This
is my cacophony. I reach
for
the harmony
out of reach, welcome dis-
order,
fast river carrying
bombed-out
bridges, swirling
colors
from clay banks,
dead
fish, the
trash, a roar of contrasts
and
clashes of pitches─a music
scribbling
prayers illegibly.
John Levy (he/him) lives on the outskirts of Tucson with his wife, the painter Leslie Buchanan. In 2023, Shearsman Books (UK) published his 54 poems: selected & new. In 2026, Yavanika Press (India) published a book of his note poems, Notes from Tucson.